The present invention relates to an image communication apparatus for injecting a liquid droplet onto a recording member to perform image recording.
In general, a so-called ink-jet recording system (also sometimes referred to herein as "ejecting") a droplet of a liquid such as an ink onto a record sheet according to recording information to perform image recording is known.
This type of ink-jet recording system has the following drawbacks.
(1) The ink-jet recording system often causes a printing error due to evaporation or drying of ink or clogging of nozzles with dust, and in a non-recording state, a preservation operation for the recording head, such as capping, is necessary.
(2) In order to suppress such a printing error, head recovery operations such as idle injection of all the nozzles, an ink supply operation, and the like must be performed before printing, and a considerable time is required until recording is ready.
(3) When a head has a large number of nozzles, in particular, in a line head, a probability of omission of printing dots is increased.
Such drawbacks become more serious as the number of nozzles of the head is increased, and pose serious problems particularly when the ink-jet recording system is applied to an apparatus which has a relatively long standby time without recording, e.g., an image communication apparatus such as a facsimile.
Therefore, an ink-jet image communication apparatus comprising a recording head having a plurality of nozzles has not been realized yet.